Search form

You are here

Blog

The company Strava was in the news recently for its ability to display highly accurate maps using position data from personal fitness devices (e.g., Fitbit, Apple Watch, etc.). Not only are GPS fitness devices tracking a person’s mileage on land, many also track water activities, such as swimming, to within a few meters.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about how we can better teach science using data. I believe that 21st Century science is increasingly data-intensive, and that in order to teach science as it is actually being practiced, it should be possible to identify datasets and data stories relevant to most, if not all, topics in modern science to use in the classroom.

In the mid-1980s, the technology for electronically tracking ocean wildlife was just being developed. Early electronic tags relied on acoustic pings to communicate location and depth, and required captains and crews using directional hydrophones to actively follow marine animals through the ocean – for hours or days at a time.

At ODI, we spend a lot of time writing about the ever-increasing flood of data that our society produces. As scientists (which many of us in ODI happen to be), we tend to focus our thinking on the rapidly growing number of sensors deployed in every imaginable setting on our planet (and beyond!), producing endless streams of data – giving us a fundamentally new window into the workings of the world.

I got up at 4:15 AM to fly from Monterey, CA to Boston, and I don’t fly back until November 8 – which meant that one of the last things I did last night, after packing and before falling asleep, was to fill out my absentee ballot for the big election. I am so relieved. I’ve voted. Any more last-minute surprises will be too little, too late.

This past weekend I was invited to run a 2 1/2 day workshop for the Community College Undergraduate Research Initiative. CCURI (pronounced “curry”) is an NSF-funded program involving 50 community colleges, and the focus of this workshop was to engage a dozen CCURI professors in developing activities for their students to work with authentic scientific data.

At the Oceans of Data Institute, our mission is to transform education to help people succeed in school, work, and life in a data-intensive world. Unfortunately, the book explaining exactly how to do that hasn’t been written yet—so a big part of our job right now is to figure out what a “data literate individual” looks like, and from that information, to determine the steps required in a person’s educational career for them to become data literate.

This spring is a time for celebrations for my family. We just celebrated our first year in our house and the first anniversary of my starting full-time with EDC. Over the past few weeks two of my sons have graduated from college, and this Saturday my oldest daughter is getting married. Happy days indeed!

Last week I had the pleasure of traveling to Portland, Maine to meet with colleagues at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI). I had never been to Portland, coming from California, but had been told that Portland was a great foodie town, with the largest number of small brew-pubs per capita east of Portland, Oregon. That sounded great to me, and in truth, it was even better than that! Portland is filled with local shops, charming side streets, as well as restaurants right on the water.